The Twittering Crowd

Here is an animated visualization of tweets with the hashtag #Jan25, just before and just after Mubarak’s resignation, with retweets and their connections, by André Panisson of Gephi. (Via Slashdot—thanks to Samantha Henig for pointing it out.) It’s beautiful. It starts like a spider spinning a web, then a many-pointed structure forms around the center, like a crystal or a new star. But the symmetry is not exact: it is more fearful than mathematical. There are areas that resemble the red spot on Jupiter, and perhaps were similarly stormy. There are pushes and pulls, and maybe shoving. It is more like the the Spirograph drawings I made when I was six, with sudden lurches where my pencil slipped (as it always did), than like the perfectly looping ones in the toy commercials. It is very human.

Panisson writes,

I was very lucky to get this data. On February 11 afternoon I was testing the Python server that works as bridge and connected to Twitter. I tried some interesting hashtags to see it working, and at the moment #jan25 seemed to be an active hashtag. I let the application run for some time, adjusted some parameters for visualization, and at some point there was a burst in the activity. I didn’t understood what was happening until I checked again my Twitter account and realized that the Egypt’s vice-president had just made the resignation announcement.

He writes like a bystander with a recorder on when a crowd started shouting—in that sense, this is a sort of networked Zapruder film. I don’t know enough about the technical aspects—could one also reënact these moments? A second rendering is below; on Panisson’s site, this version is dynamic, allowing one to zoom in on particular Twitter users. (Andy Carvin, an NPR producer, appears to have been one of the hubs.)

One wonders how much the tweeting map resembles one that could be made of the crowd in Tahrir Square that night, and their interactions. The news about the attack on Lara Logan, the CBS reporter, amid that crowd, is jarring and awful; one just wishes her well. CBS News says that some Egyptian women (and soldiers) came to her aid—there’s that, at least. (Some of the responses to her story, on Twitter and elsewhere, have been unattractive.) The incident complicates, though it doesn’t erase, the picture of that night: the clusters of people, the way they moved and met, the points that stood alone, the ones that clustered in scribbled spots—both bright and ugly—and the lines that rush across, like rescue flares, and perhaps form unexpected connections.